Tyson Sawyer wrote: > Its been at least 10 years since I have actually done a recovery of > this sort. ...back then LILO was king and floppy drives were still in > use. I've been lucky enough to not do much sysadmin work in recent > years. > > So... > > I have a small home server running a not quite up to date version of > Ubuntu 8.10. It has an 80G main drive that is the OS and > applications. It has an external USB drive that is our primary data > storage. It has a 2nd USB drive that is used to backup the rest of > the system, a couple of laptops and an N810. We use BackupPC for the > backups and occasionally check that it is working and have > occasionally recovered a single file. > > The primary drive has gone on the blink. About 4-5 days ago the > primary system drive reported some sort of complaint and the OS > remounted it read-only. We rebooted, said, "Damn, well we'll have to > replace that" and went about life. This morning we found the system > mostly unresponsive. The caps-lock LED was about the only response we > could get out of it. > > The filesystem on the system drive is (or should be) backed up. We > would like to recover the system rather than rebuild to avoid having > to figure out all the applications we had installed and figure out how > we had them configured. There is a reasonable chance that we can > reboot the old drive again, but I have not yet tried. > > We will attempt to find a replacement drive today. We live in > Brookline, NH and work in Bedford, MA. Any suggestions on stores or > drive brands? > > Any suggestions on recovery strategy? One strategy I had in mind is > (if the old drive still runs) is to boot the old drive with the new as > a secondary. Shut down all extra services. Partition and format the > new drive. Copy the filesystem from the old to the new. Install Grub > on the new (dont' know how, never done much with Grub) and boot it. > Do some sort of restore from BackupPC to restore any libraries for > files that have been corrupted. > > Other suggestions? ...or fill in the details (specifically the > install of Grub and moving to the primary position) of what I have > outlined? > > Oh, the drive is a standard sized IDE. > > Thanks! > Ty > >
You might want to take this opportunity (;^) to triage your system. If you have installed lot's of apps you will undoubtedly have apps that you never use. This will automatically take them off your system. You should also be able to perform a clean install to a new hard drive in just a relatively few minutes. One way to contaminate a system is to try to pick and choose from the pieces of an old system. As for disk drives the big sellers are still Western Digital and Seagate. You might see Maxtor in a retail store but they are now owned by Seagate. Recently Seagate had serious problems with their disk drives. They responded by reducing the length of their warranty unless you pay extra for their "corporate" versions. I have had good luck with both Western Digital and Seagate in having warranties honored. A few months back one of my clients had a 2.5 inch Seagate drive fail (had a 3 year warranty) and all I did was generate an automated RMA on the Seagate web site and then print it out, package up the bad drive and ship it to Seagate. About a week later I got new replacement drive. The drive had been in use at the customer site for about two years. Other manufacturers whose products might be in a retail store are Toshiba and Hitachi. I haven't had an undue number of problems with their products but remember that all drives eventually fail. It's not "If" but a matter of "When". One manufacturer that I have read horror stories about is Samsung. The typical problem is that it is difficult to get through to their support and then they tend to deny coverage. I have had DOA's with just about every drive you can buy. About six months ago I bought a 160 GB Western Digital drive at Best Buy. DOA. I exchanged it for another identical model. DOA. At that point I returned it for a refund and informed the Best Buy manager that they probably had a bad run on that model and they might consider pulling them (they did). In the last six months I have installed at least two Western Digital 500 GB IDE hard drives and they have so far worked without incident. YMMV. -Alex _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
